


5 Broken Things +1 Mended

by downjune



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, De-Serumed Steve Rogers, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-02 01:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21153266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: Steve looked where Bucky was looking and winced. “Just a bruise, Buck,” he answered.“From what?”“Not sure,” he answered honestly. “We haven’t had a mission since I got back from returning the stones. Last thing I did was knock Johann Schmidt off a cliff on Vormir, and he didn’t weigh all that much.”





	5 Broken Things +1 Mended

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).

> Phew! This story kicked my butt. Steve/Bucky is an intimidating ship to write, turns out. But I love a good 5 +1 and I'm happy with how this one turned out. Happy Trick or Treat--this story feels like a little bit of both!

1

The ache in his forearm just…didn’t go away after he came back. Steve successfully ignored it until Bucky said from the corner of his mouth, “You’ve been rubbing the damn thing for two weeks. What gives?” In the middle of a holo-briefing with the remaining Avengers, Steve didn’t answer. In fact, he discreetly shoved Bucky’s arm with his elbow—thankfully, it wasn’t the vibranium one—and managed to mask his wince. 

Rhodey had taken up Nat’s mantel after everything, coordinating the recovery effort, with the other half of the world abruptly back in it, and he didn’t seem to notice their interruption. Bucky didn’t ask again and Steve made a point of not rubbing his arm until after their global counterparts flickered out of view. 

Hoping Bucky had let it go, Steve exited the briefing room and slung his jacket over his shoulder. He did it with the arm that didn’t hurt. “Wanna grab lunch?” he asked. “That deli you found the other week?” He loved that the Avengers’ New York headquarters had come back to Manhattan. Loved being in his city with everybody back where they belonged. 

“Yeah, sounds good,” Bucky answered with his usual faint smile. 

They were silent in the elevator, but Steve never felt the need to fill it, and when they got to the bottom of Stark Tower—given its old name again for obvious reasons—the noise of the city poured between them anyway. Bucky had his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched to make himself a little smaller, and Steve nudged him gently as they walked.

“You’re a free man, Buck,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the cab horn honking to their right. “Nobody breathing down your neck anymore.”

“That your way of telling me to stand up straight?” he asked with a smirk. “You sound like my mother.”

Steve smiled, mostly just glad Bucky could remember his mom again. “Your mother loved me, and you loved your mother, so I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Bucky turned that smirk against his shoulder and headed for the subway entrance, but on an impulse, Steve reached out to stop him, catching him by the elbow. He did it with his sore arm and swallowed around the tight sound his throat wanted to make. 

“Hey, let’s walk. I’m still just glad to have New York feel like New York again.” There’d be more people to spot them and take their picture, but Steve didn’t mind that any more than he minded the extra traffic and noise. 

Bucky nodded and fell back into step with him.

The deli bustled with the lunch rush, and with all the people and the early summer day outside, Steve stripped back out of his jacket at their table in the corner. He was hungry enough to eat three sandwiches, so hungry he rolled up his shirt sleeves and tucked in without thinking what Bucky might see, seated across from him. 

Bucky’s sandwich froze on its way back to his plate from his mouth. He chewed and swallowed before he spoke. “The hell is that?” he asked, his voice quiet and low like it’d been since Steve had found him in Bucharest. 

Steve looked where Bucky was looking and winced. He set his own sandwich down. “Just a bruise, Buck,” he answered. 

“From what?”

It was uglier than he’d thought. Last he’d seen it, it’d barely been visible at all, but now a mottled, deep bluish-purple spread along the outside edge of his forearm, right where the bone had ached for the last two weeks.

“Not sure,” he answered honestly. “We haven’t had a mission since I got back from returning the stones. Last thing I did was knock Johann Schmidt off a cliff on Vormir, and he didn’t weigh all that much.”

“You should probably get it checked out, right?” Bucky took another bite, but he kept a wary eye on Steve while he ate. “When’s the last time you kept a bruise for two weeks?”

“Since that fight in the alley behind Joe’s Appliance Repair,” Steve answered distractedly. He narrowed his eyes slightly. The bruise ran where the shield rested against his arm. He’d never bruised there before—or, anyway, the shield had never bruised him there. “You remember, right? It took a month at least for my ribs to look normal after that.”

“They were probably broken. Couldn’t afford x-rays back then.”

“Right.” He rolled his shirt sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff. A strange feeling in his gut told him he didn’t want an x-ray now either.

2 

He got one. Whether he wanted it or not.

When he and Sam and Nat had been on the run from Ross and those damn Accords, he’d trained with them whenever they’d had the space for it—mostly for their benefit. Sam and Nat needed to blow off steam, and without the benefit of their own super-soldier serum, time off from training meant slower reflexes and reaction time. And that could get them killed. 

Steve had pulled his punches, of course. They hadn’t pulled theirs. 

So when Sam kicked his knee in during a hand-to-hand session in Stark Tower, and the entire joint exploded inward, Steve felt confusion before the pain that brought him to the ground a moment later. He tried to push to his feet, and ended up on his back.

Sam’s voice came from down a wind tunnel—or no, that was his blood rushing in his ears.

“Stay down, stay down, man. Jesus—shit. Hold on.”

He disappeared from Steve’s view, and Steve rubbed his eyes. When he opened them, Bucky hovered over him, confusion all over his face. “What the hell, Steve?”

“I know, right?” he managed. “Sam visits from the DC office, and this is how I play host.”

“Oh my god, shut up,” Bucky muttered. “Is medical even operational here yet?” He looked up and squinted.

“I’m sure it’s fine—the facilities and my knee.”

“How does it feel?”

“Like fire.”

*

So, the x-ray. And an ultrasound. Stark Tower did have the imaging equipment, even if the medical facility itself was still being renovated. Bruce even came in for the consult—which did nothing to settle that uneasy pit in Steve’s stomach. He didn’t want to see what the x-rays would tell him. 

He already knew what the x-rays would tell him. 

“You’ve got ulnar stress fractures from the shield, meta-carpal stress fractures from all the punching, and enough bone loss for someone three times your age and half your weight.”

Steve gave Bruce a look. 

“Which, I guess you are three times your age, more or less, but your bones look like sponges.”

“I was half this weight, before, too,” Steve said quietly. “And I thought we were here to talk about my knee.”

“Your knee is blown.” Bruce took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Steve suspected he kept them as a connection to his smaller, more fragile human self because he certainly didn’t need them in his hulk form. “I’d say your unreal healing factor would knit your MCL and ACL back together in a few days, but I’d have thought it’d prevent everything else I’m seeing here. This is some of the most rapid deterioration I’ve ever seen.” He gestured at the x-rays. When Bucky had spotted the bruises under his gloves and sleeves, he’d insisted on a full scan. “What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know, Doc, you tell me,” Steve bit out. “What does half a dozen trips through the quantum realm do to a guy’s super serum? How long would it have lasted anyway? Did I bargain it away on Vormir?”

“Did you bargain it away on Vormir?” Bruce asked.

“I thought about it,” he answered, compelled by his shame to admit that he hadn’t had the guts to go through with it, no matter that Schmidtt had said it wouldn’t be enough to bring Nat back. “Looks like I lost it, anyway.”

“Looks like,” Bruce echoed quietly, returning his attention to the x-rays. 

Steve couldn’t bring himself to do the same.

“I’d say you’re looking at surgery for the knee, and medication for the bone loss. Good news is, we’ve come a long way since you last would’ve needed either.”

Steve nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

*

Bucky sat with him later, back in his own apartment in the Tower. He’d been fitted with a brace and crutches until his surgery, and the crutches leaned against the wall, waiting for him.

“You should talk to Sam,” Bucky said, sitting forward on Steve’s couch. “He feels terrible about your knee.”

“It’s not his fault,” Steve said, though he wasn’t quite ready to say that to Sam yet. He shifted the ice pack on his knee until it lay more comfortably.

“Of course, it’s not. I told him he did you a favor, finally getting you to stop and see a doctor. I thanked him.”

Steve looked up sharply. “What?”

“I knew something was different, ever since you came back from dropping off those stones. You moved different, acted different.” Bucky looked away. There was a Mets game on TV. They were still bad, but at least they were back. “Honestly, I didn’t think you were even gonna come back.”

Which was not where this had started.

“I almost didn’t,” Steve admitted anyway, and Bucky’s face twitched with the slightest flinch, just like he expected. It was why he hadn’t said anything before.

“What changed your mind?” Bucky asked, his voice barely a croak. 

“I dunno, a couple things, I guess.” He rubbed his hands gently together, massaging the ache in his brittle, hollowed bones. He was on the good painkillers, so they didn’t hurt much. The fact that the drugs actually worked spoke to the changes in his internal chemistry almost as much as the x-rays did. 

“I took the Space stone back last. Saw Peggy. Saw the life she’d built for herself and knew I couldn’t railroad her out of it. Even if I’d gone back earlier. She had kids.” He rubbed his busted knuckles and said, “I could tell something was off, too. With me. I felt…worn out in a way I hadn’t since before the serum. I wanted to—” He looked up and found Bucky watching him. “I wanted to come home.”

Bucky gave him a smile that looked sad on the face of it, but was somehow the happiest Steve had seen him in decades. “You gotta keep me in the loop from now on, pal,” he said. “You gotta tell me what’s going on with you.”

Steve nodded. “I will. But you can’t treat me—treat this—” He gestured at his knee, his failing bones. “—like I’m broken.”

Bucky shrugged easily. “Hey, it’s a deal. And likewise.”

Opening his mouth to protest, to ask what Bucky meant, Steve read the expectations in his eyes and gave an answering shrug, his a little more sheepish. “Deal.” If Steve wasn’t broken, then neither was Bucky.

3 

He got real speedy on those crutches in the time after surgery and before rehab. Pushups, he did with his bad leg hooked over his good one. With every weight-bearing exercise his physical therapist put him through, he raced his body to beat its own destruction. Mostly it felt like treading water.

Bruce theorized that jumping through the quantum realm a bunch of times had accelerated the properties of the serum, so while he hadn’t aged, the serum had—and taken it out on his bones like an over-active thyroid. He stood in front of the mirror, crutches leaning next to him, and recognized the sharpness of his elbows and ribs like old friends. Despite the loss of muscle mass, he was tall, for now.

“So, what, you’re finally vain?” Bucky asked, coming up behind him in the locker room after his first PT session. 

Steve buttoned his shirt and resorted to one of his old tricks to make it fit better—folding it over in the back and tucking it into his pants so it didn’t hang off him like a bag. “No, I just need some new shirts.” He glanced up from his own reflection to Bucky’s. “Where’ve you been? Haven’t seen you in a few days.”

Bucky’s gaze slid sideways, and Steve felt it, like for a fraction of a second, the earth had tilted too.

“Buck?” he pressed. 

“You've got enough to worry about. Let me handle this.”

“Handle what?” Steve turned to face him, keeping most of his weight off the knee. “We’re keeping each other in the loop, remember? Nobody's gotta handle anything on their own.”

Bucky's mouth pinched in a frown he directed at the floor. “Yeah, yeah," he grumbled. "All right, just try not to blow your top.”

“When have I ever—”

“I don’t know.”

Steve hesitated, not sure what exactly Bucky was copping to. 

Finally, he looked up, eyes tight. “I don’t know where I was. I lost some time.”

Steve must have looked as stricken as he felt because Bucky looked like he’d been kicked. “I—I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t like—”

“The doctors in Wakanda—the king’s sister—she was supposed to get all that junk out of your head.”

“She did, Steve—”

“How do you know?” Panic reared up in him. They would have to run again if Bucky had violated the terms of his probationary period, and Steve couldn’t run. But he’d have to, because he wasn’t letting Bucky go on his own, so he’d just have to find a way to get strong again. He’d read up on Stark’s run-in with Killian and Extremis ten years ago. Maybe he was a candidate. The way his lungs were tightening, he’d need something to keep his airways open as well as his bones from snapping if they were going to run. “How do you _know_?” he repeated.

Bucky was helping him to sit on the locker room bench and dropped down next to him. “Because Maria Hill picked me up and said that I didn’t. She said I wandered around like I had no idea where I was, bought some fruit at a farmer’s market, and walked to Brooklyn.”

“You’re sure?” Steve sucked in a careful breath, and Bucky’s eyes sharpened at the slight whistle they both heard. “That sounds like something you’d do anyway.”

Bucky at least smiled a little at his attempt at humor. “I’m pretty sure she and Fury would jump at the chance to take me out if I step wrong, so. I must not’ve stepped wrong.”

“But you lost time.”

He nodded, but then shrugged. “Hey, maybe my serum’s wearing out, too.” He sounded downright hopeful at the possibility.

“Wouldn’t we be a pair.”

Bucky ducked his gaze as his smile broadened, but when he raised his head again, it had faded. “I should probably get in to see the doc, too, huh?”

“And you should move to my floor of the Tower. Hell, I’d ask you to move into my spare room, but I know you like your space.”

“Steve, the only reason I haven’t shown up in your spare room is I know you like _your_ space.”

Steve exhaled a short laugh. “Well, I guess that’s settled, then. It’s a small loop.”

“Guess so.” Bucky lifted his chin a little. “I like small ones better, anyway.”

4 (and 5)

The alarm yanked Steve out of a deep sleep, and he shot upright in his bed, head fuzzy. The thing about living in Stark Tower, it was a little like living in a fire station. When the alarm rang, you answered, even if you didn’t deploy with the other resident Avengers. 

His phone wouldn’t stop yelling at him until he acknowledged his receipt of the alert, and lately, Steve was having some trouble getting out of bed, so he kept his phone across the room to force himself out. Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he pressed his hand briefly to the tiny surgery scars on his knee. They’d all but disappeared. Then, with a grunt, he shoved against his bony thighs and pushed to his feet. 

His leg was always stiff first thing in the morning, so he hobbled over to his dresser and snatched the phone off it, leaning on his good one to read the alert: an enhanced human wrecking a shopping center upstate. Quinjet deploying in fifteen.

“Buck?” he called. “You in on this one?”

The alert still chirped through the wall in Bucky’s room until it abruptly cut off with a crunch, and silence fell in the apartment. 

“Buck?” he called again. The hairs rose on the back of his neck and arms.

His door slammed open in the next second, and he whirled to face it. His ankle rolled slightly—just enough these days—and he felt the bones in his foot shift and give like cracks in ice. Gritting his teeth, he faced Bucky where he stood in Steve’s open doorway, the busted phone in his hand and a look of blank confusion on his face.

“Shit.” Steve said it under his breath, but Bucky’s gaze snapped to his.

“What the hell is this?” he asked. “Steve, where are we?” He looked Steve up and down. “And when’d you get so tall?”

“You know who I am,” Steve said, shoulder slumping in relief. 

“’Course I do, what’re you talking about?”

“Nothing, just—”

“What are we doing here, Steve?”

In the short months since Bucky had moved in with him, he’d had a couple of these episodes, and each time he’d looked at Steve like a stranger and not remembered anything after. Steve could only think Bucky was looping back to a time when Steve had been wiped from his mind.

“We live here,” Steve answered. “This is our place.”

Bucky glanced around, the wildness in his expression retreating at Steve’s assurance. “Ours, huh? How do we afford it?” He took a few wary steps into the room. 

“Well, we work for the owners of the place, more or less.” Steve shifted his weight and winced at the flare of pain in his foot. Another stress fracture—he didn’t need an x-ray to know by this point. 

Bucky looked him up and down, skepticism playing openly through his expression in a way Steve hadn’t seen since the 40s. How strange was it to recognize someone different in a face he saw almost every day? “What kind of work, exactly?”

Steve limped back over to the bed and dropped down to the mattress with a grunt. “The kind we haven’t been doing much of lately.” He tapped out a quick response to the alert that he and Bucky would check in, but they wouldn’t be making the trip upstate. Given the givens, they weren’t really expected to.

“You’re hurt,” Bucky observed. “You get in a scrap again?” He crossed to the bed and sat at the foot. He looked at Steve like all he had to do was say the word and he’d crack a few skulls for him. How easily he believed what Steve told him. 

“You could say that,” Steve answered. 

“I did say that, yeah. What would you say?”

Steve searched Bucky’s face, and it was the strangest thing—his hair was still long and shaggy, tied back in a knot the way he wore it to sleep, his jaw rough with a short beard—yet he looked years younger. Had he really looked this young before everything had gone south? Had he looked at Steve this way?

“I’d say…maybe I forgot what my life was like for a while, but it’s caught up with me, and boy am I remembering.”

Bucky glanced around the room, then out to the living room and kitchen they shared—state of the art, of course, underneath what Steve had brought up from his DC apartment. “Seems all right to me,” Bucky said. “This life you’ve got.” He shot Steve a sidelong look. “We’ve got.”

Steve had a little trouble swallowing with Bucky’s eyes on him like that. He cleared his throat and looked away. “I spent—I spent a lotta years doing a job I couldn’t have done when we were kids. I was strong. Fast. Almost indestructible. Now, I’m—I don’t know what I am.” Probably not Captain America for much longer. Not when the bones in his feet gave if he shifted his weight too suddenly. 

He shook his head, forced a laugh, and returned his focus to where it should have been. What kind of coward confessed his fears to someone who wouldn’t remember them? “I’m sorry, Buck. This isn’t your problem.”

Bucky snorted. “Like hell it isn’t. We’re a team. And we’re…” He shifted a little closer, close enough that he could touch Steve’s leg and hook his fingers gently around his knee. Steve stared at those fingers, mechanical, deadly, and cool just below the leg of his boxer shorts, and hoped his heart was still equipped for this kind of shock. He wondered if it ever had been. 

“How’s your arm feel today?” he blurted desperately, and the piercing blue of Bucky’s eyes dropped reflexively to where his vibranium hand gripped Steve’s leg. He let go and lifted his hand. The rest of his arm was hidden by a long-sleeved shirt, but it was startling enough to him. He flipped his hand front and back, blinked hard and shook his head, and when he opened his eyes, he was himself again, present in the body he knew.

“Steve.” He looked up, gaze a little wild. “What—”

“It’s all right. You’re all right.” A strange mix of relief and regret flooded through him, his extremities tingling with it. “It was a short episode this time—you didn’t do anything.”

But Steve was still a terrible liar, and Bucky still knew that. His gaze dropped to the narrow space between them and back up. 

“The team’s headed upstate,” Steve interrupted. Even though Bucky hadn’t said anything, his thoughts were obviously going a mile a minute. “We should check in with them. See if they need anything from our end here.”

They wouldn’t. The Avengers had already left Steve and Bucky in the rearview mirror. Damaged relics. Steve hadn’t been ready to call it yet, but he was getting there. After this, he'd be irresponsible not to. The finality of that thought settled like a rock in his middle, that same mix of relief and regret along with it.

“Yeah,” Bucky said finally. “Yeah.” He pushed to his feet and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, tugged the tie free and slid it around his wrist. He didn’t look at Steve. “I’ll be quick in the shower.”

Steve blew out a breath when he’d gone. He rubbed his hands over his face and pressed his fingers against his eyelids. “Holy shit,” he said to his empty room.

+1 

“Steve, man, I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll take it. You’re the one for the job, Sam. There’s no one I’d rather—”

“I kicked in Captain America’s knee and forced you into early retirement. How can you—” Sam cut himself off and shook his head, mouth pinched in a frown. He didn’t take the shield from Steve.

“It isn’t that early, believe me.” He set the shield aside, leaning it against his couch. “And it wasn’t your fault. I shoulda said that to you months ago.”

Sam shook his head again. “I wouldn’t have listened then, but thanks.” He surprised Steve with a quick hug and carefully slapped him on the back, just hard enough to let Steve know he didn’t think he was made of glass. It was still strange to fit easily inside somebody’s arms again. 

“What’re you gonna do? Will you stay in the Tower?”

Steve stepped back and straightened his shirt where the hug had rumpled it. He’d broken down and bought some fitted ones. Slim-fit to be exact. He was trying not to be sore about it. “Nah,” he answered. “Time to clear out for a while. We’d like to move back to Brooklyn, but I’m not sure what an Army pension gets a guy these days.”

Sam slanted a look at him. “Pretty sure you get to retire any place you want to.”

Shoving his hands in his pockets, Steve shrugged and grinned. “Yeah, but it’s on the taxpayer’s dime, so I’m gonna try to keep a low profile.”

“I figured you’d say that.” Sam glanced around the apartment—neither Steve nor Bucky had started packing yet. “Think you’ll be able to give it up? Running the ops, calling the plays? You know, you’re pretty bossy.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that.” Steve ducked his head slightly. “And we’ll see, I guess. I think I’m actually looking forward to it.” 

“From my sense of things—you know, reading the room—everybody thought, ‘That Steve Rogers, he doesn’t know when to quit.’ But, my own personal responsibility and guilt aside, I think it’s good to know when. I'm happy for you, man.”

Steve glanced back up and offered a smile. “I’m gonna miss working with you.”

Sam ducked his head, too, and smiled. “Likewise. It’s not gonna be the same. But I guess nothing ever is, right?” Taking a breath, he looked over at the shield again. “You’re serious about that, huh? You don’t want it to retire with you?”

Steve shook his head, surer about this than anything. “No, I think it’s important that people know Captain America isn’t retiring.” He shot a significant look at Sam, who laughed.

“All right, all right.” He picked up the shield and fit it over his arm. “I’ll do my best.”

Steve clapped him on the shoulder, feeling better than he had in weeks. “I know.”

*

They stood in the midst of their boxed-up apartment, and Steve for some reason had thought there’d be more. He didn’t know why—he'd never had much to carry with him, and Bucky’d only had a few months to accumulate anything. But taking stock of their worldly possessions on a Thursday morning, two hours before the movers were scheduled to arrive, his stomach tightened and knotted with something that might have been panic.

He met Bucky’s gaze across the room and saw the same expression mirrored there. 

“All right, Buck?” he asked.

Bucky jerked his chin in answer. He folded his arms across his chest. “Yeah, sure. You?” 

Steve frowned. “I dunno. I should be, right?”

Bucky’s expression went so carefully blank, Steve thought for a moment he was having an episode. 

“You still with me?” he asked, just in case.

“Yeah, yeah.” Bucky blinked and came out of it. “I’m just thinking you shoulda told me you weren’t sure about this before we signed a lease and packed up all our stuff.” 

“It’s not that I’m not…” Steve shook his head and tried to put to words the knots in his stomach. “It’s not that I’m not sure about the apartment. I just keep thinking about this thing Sam asked me, years ago now. Just after I’d met him. He asked what made me happy, and I told him I didn’t know. I hadn’t—I had no idea you were still alive, and I guess I thought it didn’t really matter that I didn’t know what I wanted. I had a purpose. I had a job, and I thought that was probably enough.”

Bucky nodded but didn’t speak, inviting him to continue. 

“I’m thinking it matters now that I can’t do what I used to. I better figure it out.”

“Right now?” Bucky looked around their Tower apartment, and Steve exhaled a laugh.

“Probably not the best time, right?”

“Nah, let’s do it.” His mouth twitched in a crooked smile. “Got nothing else to do until the movers get here.”

Steve checked his watch. Was an hour and fifty minutes enough time to reroute the direction of his life? Of their lives? Hydra’s programming might have been removed, but Bucky’s mind had yet to heal. It might never heal—which took him off active duty as effectively as Steve’s weakened bones did.

“Got any suggestions?” Steve finally asked.

Now it was Bucky’s turn to laugh. He shrugged. “A few.”

“Really?”

He looked a little sheepish. “It’s not like I’ve had much else to think about lately.”

“I get that.” If only Steve had been so productive with his mandatory leave. “Well, let’s hear’em,” he said when Bucky didn’t volunteer any. 

Bucky shook his head and twitched a shrug, one of those moments when his natural confidence ran up against the last several decades of not being allowed to hold a coherent image of himself. 

“No pressure,” Steve said quietly.

Bucky nodded and took a breath. “I just think…it’d be nice to not have to follow orders anymore. Or ever again. It’d be nice to be our own bosses, right?”

Steve’s throat tightened for no reason he could immediately label. “Yeah, Buck, that’d be real nice.”

“I mean, we’re too old for that shit. But we’re not—we’re _not_ old. Just ‘cause you’ve got osteoporosis and I’ve got dementia doesn’t mean—” He laughed again, a strained, rough sound. “I want a life, Steve. I want to…to fix things or make things. I wanna figure out _what_ I want to fix or make. I wanna set my own hours and feel like I added something to the world by the end of the day. I want us to do that. Somehow.” He stopped there and wouldn’t look right at Steve as he waited for his reaction, fighting off years of conditioning in the effort. 

Steve’s throat was so tight he could hardly speak. “The only thing I ever wanted was to help people—to feel like I could help. What was I worth if I had nothing to contribute?”

“You’ve got plenty to contribute.” Bucky said it like he'd been saying it for years. “I always knew you did, way before you enlisted and decided to become a symbol of freedom and democracy and whatever.”

Steve couldn’t help smiling at that. “Thanks, Buck. Now that I can’t do what I used to, I’m thinking it was never my only option. I felt like it was after everything Dr. Erskine did for me. I had a duty to use what he’d given me. But now—what if I just. Looked after us. What if that’s what I came back to do?”

He’d been so close to using his last vial of Pym particles to get back to Peggy in the 40s. To pick up where they’d left off. Snatch Bucky out of Hydra’s hands and get that dance. Have that future. But he would’ve had to leave this Bucky here, stranded.

“I couldn’t leave you here on your own,” he said, almost to himself.

“You came back for me.”

Steve looked up to find Bucky regarding him with eyes more intense than he’d ever seen. Maybe this was some new amalgamation of Bucky and the Winter Soldier he didn’t fully know yet. The thought heated his chest. There was still so much he didn’t know about this Bucky. He had time now to learn. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this grateful. Not even for Erskine’s serum.

He would never have thought so back then, of course, back when he had so much to prove. But he hoped he'd gained some perspective in the ensuing decades.

“You came back for _me_.” Bucky’s expression twitched, like he might burst into laughter or tears depending on the direction of the wind, or what Steve said next.

Steve drew himself up to his full height. He was still taller. “Yeah, I did. I don’t know what I wanna do beyond this.” He gestured around at their boxes. “But I know that much.”

Bucky rubbed his eyes and his mouth in a quick, hard gesture. He sniffed once. “Well, we’ve still got our G.I. Bill waiting, so that buys some time to figure it out.” 

Steve nodded. “Yeah. Good thing.”

Bucky smiled finally and dropped his gaze, and Steve said, before the thought had fully formed in his mind, before the consequences were fully considered, “Do you think that you used to be… Do you remember that you were in love with me?”

He wasn’t going to ask. He’d planned to not think about it after Bucky’s last episode.

But their names were on the lease for a two-bedroom place in Canarsie, and it didn’t seem fair that they get into something like that without—well, without some honesty. 

Bucky hadn’t spoken. He didn’t seem to be breathing either. Steve swallowed with some difficulty. There were no take-backs. No do-overs. Not even time travel would solve this one. And anyway, Steve preferred to hang on to his remaining bone density.

Bucky’s jaw clenched hard, which meant one of a couple possibilities—hopefully not punching Steve through a wall. Because he’d never known how or wanted to turn away from a fight, Steve crossed the space between them, stepped over some boxes, and stopped a few feet from Bucky.

“I ask because, I don’t have a clue how to do more than we’re doing, but I know there _is_ more than we’re doing, and if you still—if you wanted—”

“Jesus Christ, Steve, shut up for a second.” Bucky exhaled noisily in what might have been a laugh.

“Sure.” Steve put his hands in his pockets.

“You tryin’ to give me a heart attack or something?” Bucky shot him a quick, complicated look.

“Of course not.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

Steve shrugged, though there was nothing casual in what he wanted. It was possibly the most misleading gesture he’d ever made, given what he was about to ask for. “The truth, if you’ve got it.”

“Or we could just move our stuff and get on with our lives and forget you asked.”

Steve nodded. “That’s true; we could do that. Is that what you want?”

Bucky hesitated for a long moment, and Steve took his chances, drawing another step closer, putting Bucky within reach.

And with a minute twitch of his head, no, he reached for Steve, his vibranium hand catching him gently by the elbow. Steve caught hold of his elbow too, and they stayed there for a long moment. 

“It doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to,” Bucky said quietly. “I’ve mostly convinced myself it doesn’t mean anything. There’s never been a point in the last century when it could’ve meant anything.”

Looking down at their joined arms, Steve said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s everything.” He rocked his weight forward just enough and tilted his chin down just enough and did the one thing he could think to do. 

They kissed like that, like there was a puddle or a bench between them, until Bucky reminded him that there wasn’t actually and shifted forward, sliding one foot between his and bringing his other hand to Steve’s waist. 

It fit the way Steve remembered it—from back when Bucky would wade in and grab him out of a fight, or help him back from one he’d lost—and he exhaled slowly against Bucky’s mouth.

“Yeah?” Bucky said.

Steve nodded and tipped his brow against Bucky’s. Somewhere along the line he’d closed his eyes.

“You’re not wrong,” Bucky said. The hand he brought to Steve’s jaw was shaking a little, so Steve slid his arms around his waist and held them both still. 

“All right, then.”

With no particular need to be anywhere else, they stayed there like that until just before the movers were due to arrive.

Then they took the subway to Brooklyn and walked the short distance to their new place to wait for their stuff. Steve’s foot ached some, but he had a top-of-the-line walking boot and Bucky’s shoulder against his. On the way, they made plans for where they’d get dinner and what they’d unpack first. 

They decided on the bed.

~end~


End file.
